


live by love though the stars walk backward

by fluffywonder



Series: Tough Way To Live, Good Way Not To Die [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie), F/M, Iron Man 2, IronWidow - Freeform, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 23:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18648385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffywonder/pseuds/fluffywonder
Summary: The 5 people Natasha meets on her journey to learning what it is to love, and the 1 person who makes the lesson stick(She learns that, in order to genuinely, fully love someone else, you have to love yourself first)





	live by love though the stars walk backward

**Author's Note:**

> Totally ignores canon.

Love is for children, she said.

She lied.

The Red Room cut out her ability to bear children, for fear of her waking up one day and having something she loved more than the mission, more than her orders. They cut out her heart and stuffed something else into the gaping hole left behind, they filled it with the ability to fake a smile, to bat an eyelash, to crook a finger, to make any statement sound like the sweetest, purest truth. They gave her the tools to hide behind blank faces and new identities, be whatever they want her to be. But much as they tried, they could not cut out her ability to feel genuine emotion, so they did the next best thing - they never gave her the opportunity to do so. They conditioned her and re-conditioned her, made her and unmade her, until even  she  could not tell what was real emotion and what was not, much less the people she was fooling. After that, it became easier to fake it all the time - she never had to battle the voices in her head as long as she was whoever the person in front of her wanted.

They could not cut little Natalia Romanova away, but they made damn sure that Black Widow was there to stay.

——

_I._

Clint’s the first person to see beneath the Black Widow. She asks him, once, when they are comfortable with each other, why he didn’t shoot her that day, why he risked defying orders. 

“You looked so young,” is all he would say, which didn’t answer her question  _at all_ back then, but  _now_ she understands that Clint had seen Natalia the minute he’d laid eyes on her. He’d seen the innocent girl she used to be, and the one she could grow to be, and the journey in between, and he’d decided that she wasn’t actually irredeemable. 

She’d faced him down expecting to kill him, because she was expected to eliminate all potential threats. A small part of her, after observing him, conceded that she might end up being the one assassinated. But instead, he had taken a risk to show her a third way, a road she would never have chosen for herself, but one he led her down with faith and determination and inexplicable gentleness. A road that led to Lila Barton being the first person she could remember saying “I love you” to her. At some point, between mission debriefings and pulled stitches, she had become ‘Auntie Nat’, and it warmed her to her very core. The memory of the first time Lila had casually said she loved _her_ , loved  her, almost as a throwaway comment, still never failed to dazzle her.

Before she knew it, Laura, with her homemade bread, and the kids, with their boundless enthusiasm and welcoming warmth, and Clint, with his refreshing honesty and unapologetic support had all taken her breath away, made her feel more genuinely than she had in years. For the first time she could remember, she was loved without expectation or reproach, loved for more than what she could accomplish, loved without being manipulated, and she—  _she did not want to lose this._

Very few people understood why she safeguarded Clint’s secret closer than most.

——

_II._

She met Coulson not long after Clint recruited her _(saved her)._ She was still horribly displaced from everything she knew and she lashed out at anything and everything, while Clint, Clint was her only anchor in this new world. They saved each other so many times, there was no score left to calculate. Phil was the first handler ever to listen to her, to hear her, the first person besides Clint to care for her beyond how useful she could be. Phil was — he was important. That was why she slowly but surely came to care about his welfare, care about him.

It helped that Clint swore by Coulson, that they were friends, but even more than that - Clint and Coulson were something no one had ever really been able to put into words. Somehow, Natasha found herself being folded into their little family of three, in which she was not an outsider or a spectator. It is a kind of belonging Natasha thought she would never find, except — except they find out, far after the fact, that he died and undied, colluded with Fury all along, and didn’t bother to tell any of them about it. This is not a mission, where death could be an unfortunate reality. This was not an op where disappearing was necessary for survival. This was betrayal, plain and simple. Phil was not a target, or a mark, or an enemy agent whose  ~~death~~  absence she could compartmentalize and write off as ‘part of life’. Phil had been one of two people she’d ever wanted to claim as  _hers_ , as family, and he had _left,_ without a second thought or a single glance back. Bad enough to hear he died, then to find out he  _chose_ to leave, to play things the way he did...

It’s when she sees Clint crumble and sob, when an unfamiliar ache takes up residence behind her ribs, that she realises — it’s the ones we love that hurt us the most.

——

_III._

Tony Stark is a difficult man to love, and yet Pepper Potts manages to do so with the utmost unselfish grace possible. Natasha first notices their bond when she is trying to figure out how to drive a wedge between them— rich, misogynistic, playboy CEO and his pretty little assistant— it shouldn’t be difficult, right? Except she has underestimated the depths of loyalty Stark and Potts have for each other, how their relationship transcends the normal bounds of the professional and even the personal. Their relationship resembles hers and Clint’s, actually. It’s the first inkling Natasha gets that she might be misreading, or at least severely underestimating, Stark.

Her intuition is confirmed when she finds out Stark signed his company over to Potts; to show that kind of unbridled trust in anyone after having nearly died at the hands of Stane means that Potts must be something really special. The more she watches, the more she’s proven right. Pepper is patient and kind, but no-nonsense at the same time. She doesn’t let Stark get away with any of his usual bullshit, but she softens when Tony’s clearly feeling overly stressed. They are a dance, Natasha muses, a perfect back and forth, beautifully twirling around each other, pulling in and out of each other’s spaces without stepping on any toes. They are the ideal exhibition of synchronicity.

She can relate, but she doesn’t understand. Her only loyalty has always ever been to herself, so she cannot comprehend Pepper’s unflinching, unrestrained loyalty to Stark — a man who, by all accounts, is self-absorbed and unreliable. Even if he wasn’t, Natasha does not understand how Potts can give so much of herself to another person — she has her limits even with Clint (she is a spy, of course she does). If it had been her, Natasha thinks, she would have taken the company and run. 

Except—

_“If this was the last birthday party you were going to have, what would you do?”_

She’s still not sure why Stark would ask a professional liar, someone he obviously doesn’t trust (because Stark seems not to trust on principle, which she approves of wholeheartedly), even without knowing her secret identity, a personal question.

She’s even less sure why she answers honestly.

_”I would do whatever I wanted to do, with whomever I wanted to do it with.”_

It’s not manipulative. She’s answering the question as she would if Clint or Laura or Coulson had asked it. Years later, she will reflect that it was Pepper Potts who first showed her how to love a difficult person through difficult times. She will think that it was Pepper who first showed her than this man, this stubborn, impossible man was worth caring about, who in turn made her see that even in the middle of lying and manipulating her way through a job, she could still be human, still be kind when it was needed. Stark showed her that she might be capable of giving, receiving, and feeling love after all.

Right then, though, she chalks the moment up to one of vulnerability, a nugget of truth about herself she will hold close to her chest. In her mind, however, that one moment does not negate the feckless, erratic, irresponsible behavior she’s witnessed from Stark. She can sympathise with the man for almost having died, but she’d been sent to assess whether he’s Avengers material, and he’s definitely not that, not if he acts like this under pressure. A hero faces death every day, she reasons.

_Tony Stark not recommended._

——

_IV._

Bruce is the first person she tells about her infertility, and her whole body radiates with cold the moment the words slip past her lips. She’s not sure why she cares so much, whether he stays or not.

Later, she’d reflect that fear was not a healthy basis for a relationship. She was scared of the Hulk, Bruce was scared of her. Later, she’d acknowledge that the monster within her was simply seeking out a reflection, and that she’d looked to Bruce as a chance to be seen and understood in ways she’d thought no one else ever could. It would only be much later that she’d acknowledge how wrong she was to ever have considered Bruce a monster in the first place, and how presumptuous she’d been, to assume that he was the only one who could ever understand her.

When the quinjet vanishes, it’s like something heavy has settled on her chest. Fury’s declaration that he’ll come back does not help at all, and she finds herself thinking of Stark, who was closer to Banner than anyone else, who must be feeling the same sense of loss and hurt as her, especially in the wake of Ultron. She thinks of Stark, who declined to come back to the compound with them, and she thinks of Steve, whose body language projects ‘good riddance’ every time Tony’s name is brought up.

She ignores the burning part of her telling her that her ill-conceived evaluation is part of what’s causing Steve to look so unfavourably upon a  former teammate. The other part of Steve’s dismissal and disdain comes from fear - Steve is scared of Tony, who is the future personified, and of possibilities both good and bad. Steve is scared of Tony the same way she and Bruce are both scared. Doubt and fear, of the unknown, of each other, of themselves, left unacknowledged and unaddressed, has fractured their team, has driven them all away from each other.

She thinks she’s beginning to understand — love and fear, for all that they are inextricably tied together, do not co-exist well. 

——

_V._

She kisses Steve because the mission demands it. _(“People are uncomfortable with public displays of affection.”)_

She kisses Steve and feels nothing inside. He is a mission.

But then slowly, he is more than just that. They joke, and they laugh, even when they’re in the eye of a brewing storm, and along the way, he becomes yet another person she can count on. And she tries to set him up because he deserves to be happy, he deserves to have someone looking out for him — someone who really cares, someone who doesn’t have a history of looking out only for themselves. He deserves someone reliable beside him, who can guide him through this new world, someone he can really count on. She trusts him, and he trusts her, but she doesn’t trust herself, especially not to be the sort of friend he needs.

_(“If it was the other way around, and it was down to me to save your life— now you be honest with me, would you trust me to do it?”_

_”I would now.”)_

_I’m always honest,_  he’d said.  _Just not when it doesn’t suit me,_ is what he’d left out.

The first indication that something is  _wrong,_ that Steve is not the man she thinks he is, is when Zola speaks, when it comes to light that the Starks’ accident was very decidedly not an accident. She realises almost right away that Steve won’t say a word to Tony, because she recognizes that selfish look in Steve’s eye, the one that  _screams_ that he would protect Bucky Barnes at absolutely any cost. She recognizes it, because it’s the same kind of look she wears around Clint, the same look she used to have around Coulson.

She lets Steve promise her he’ll tell Tony anyway, because she’s relieved. She tells herself it’s better for Stark to hear it from someone who doesn’t have a long history of manipulation.

(Honesty’s not her strong suit, but lying to herself has always been hard.)

It’s only in the aftermath that she realizes just how badly she’d miscalculated by not telling Stark. Her momentary relief at not having to deal with the situation of his parents being murdered has completely dissipated. She can see in the wreckage around her, that when she told herself Tony deserved the truth from someone better than her, she wasn’t being much of a friend to Tony. That she’d never been any kind of friend to Tony.

_(“Who do you want me to be?”_

_”How about a friend?”)_

She had been a friend to  Steve. Turns out, she’d been exactly the sort of friend Steve had needed — she’d let him go at the airport, turned her back on Tony in order to do so. Ultimately, when it came right down to it, Steve hadn’t been a friend to her. 

Later, years later, as the shock and the shame of trusting the wrong person washes over her, even as she jarringly realises that she had trusted someone else in the first place, she doesn’t know who she hates more — herself for caring, or him for making her care. She remembers her own words echoing sickeningly around her head:  _The truth is a matter of circumstances. Trust is not all things to all people all the time._ She wonders when the student became the master, and the thought makes her sick, that maybe Steve had fooled her all along, that she had misread him all along, just like she had misread Stark. 

It is only after the news about Siberia leaks, that she realizes something important, a lesson she thought she’d learnt with Coulson, but apparently, it hadn’t stuck — that not everyone we love deserves our trust.

——

_+1._

Siberia is one hell of a wake up call, and Natasha curses herself for needing a catastrophe to show her exactly how compromised she’s been all along. In the end, Tony had been right; he wasn’t blameless, but  _he_  wasn’t the one who had played it wrong — she may have thought she was trying to keep the Avengers together and work out the best solution for everyone, but the truth was, she’d chosen her side a long time ago, and it hadn’t been Tony’s. 

Turns out being a spy, or a Red Room graduate, or a cold Black Widow didn’t make her immune to hero-worship. She’d somehow wound up with blinders on, had bought a little too much into the living legend of Captain America, which made her choose Steve and vilify Tony, no matter how much or how desperately he tried to make up for his past. She snorts at herself — considering how often she talks about atoning and clearing her own ledger, she’d certainly ignored, or downright scoffed at, all of Tony’s efforts to wipe his hands clean of blood. Not only had she been compromised, she was a hypocrite too. Coulson would have been so disappointed in her and Clint. Hell, if Coulson had stuck around, the situation probably wouldn’t even have gotten as bad as it had. For all his personal faults, he’d been a hell of a handler.

It is a long time before she finds out about the severity of Tony’s injuries. Potts and Rhodes are angry; Rhodes with burning glares, Potts with arctic silences. Neither will tell her anything, and the one time she tried to visit the hospital, Pepper threatened to inform Ross of her whereabouts. It doesn’t even cross her mind to doubt Pepper Potts’ capability to make good on her statement. She thinks it would probably be poetic justice for her to find herself locked up in prison alongside the rest of Tony’s betrayers, but she cannot  _fix_ anything from prison, so she leaves quietly, followed out by the impatient tapping of Pepper Potts’ high heel. FRIDAY definitely won’t tell her anything, and Vision has apparently been instructed to ignore her existence. She  could  hack Tony’s medical files, but refrains - she figures spying and violating his trust is probably not the best way to a fresh start.

But as difficult and uncomfortable as it is, she stays. She pleads her case to the UN, throws herself more or less at the mercy of the sharks that look at her like she’s an open, bleeding wound ( _she is_ , but not for the reasons they think). She apologizes where it’s necessary, and she thinks this is the first time in her entire life she’s meant an apology this much or this honestly. It’s enough for the UN. She’s cleared to operate under the same guidelines, albeit with a few restrictions, as any other individual that considers themself a superhero.

She knows better though. Her impassioned speech, so very different from her arrogance on Capitol Hill just a few short years ago, may have been enough for the UN, but it won’t be enough for Tony. It shouldn’t be. She hasn’t  done  anything to warrant him being even halfway okay with her. The truth is, she’s not so okay with herself.

Tony’s injuries, the ones that happened because she couldn’t see past herself, past her own needs, and past Steve Rogers’ stinking shit, were the stain in her ledger she’d  never  wipe out, never be able to make up for. Sure as he’d always bear the imprint of a vibranium shield across his breastbone, she’d always bear the truth that she had a hand in destroying Tony, in innumerable ways, as a mark against her. Never mind that Tony Stark got up after every hit that would down any other ordinary man — the thing was,  he shouldn’t have to. 

So no, she wasn’t okay with herself, because he wasn’t okay. And he wasn’t okay because she was so screwed up, and wasn’t that the worst kind of vicious cycle.

When she tells Tony this, after he’s finally come back to the compound, and she’s on sort-of house arrest there, and they finally talk, unwillingly on his part - when she tells Tony about all of it, about Steve, about his parents, tells him with broken-off sentences and thick silences that scream of apologies, where she tries to make him understand just how compromised she’s become — he tells her no, she’s never had that much power over him. That what she did was nowhere  _near_ okay, but she’s not to blame for the spiral his life has become. That she’s not to blame for his own decisions, or Steve sometimes-my-teammates-don’t-tell-me-things Rogers’ decisions, or Miss Melisandre’s decisions. He tells her that he doesn’t trust her, at all, but that he can see she’s tried to clean up her part of it, and that at least she’s here, apologizing, and that it wasn’t  _all_ on her in the first place. Just like it wasn’t all on him.

He doesn’t ever say it, but she imagines that this is what true forgiveness might feel like.

_I don’t trust you, but I’m not angry anymore either._

She thinks they’ve both come a long way from the moment they first met. She can apologize and mean it, and he can forgive, without cataloguing her mistakes to use against her at a later date. He doesn’t trust her though, and that’s good — he values himself enough not to set himself up for betrayal again. It only makes her trust him more.

It takes nearly a year of watching him wheel and deal, amending the Accords, navigating the press, building a better team with so many new superheroes emerging from the corners, and refusing to say a single word about their ex-teammates, even though she knew how easily he could eviscerate them all and leave them to drown among their own shit — before she snaps.

He’s sprawled over the couch reviewing some papers for SI, and she can’t explain why she cups his cheek, pulls him in close, and kisses him carefully.

He kisses back, and it’s reminiscent of all the ways they’ve rebuilt themselves from the wreck that hangs between them.

——

“That ledger, Nat? You gotta let that go,” he murmers later, as they’re lying entwined in the dark of the bedroom with sweat rapidly cooling between them. “As long as you continue to carry it around with you, you’ll never really trust yourself. As long as the ledger exists, it’s evidence that you haven’t forgiven yourself, no matter how clean you wipe it. The only thing you can do is put it down, and move forward, and do your very best every day. The names in that ledger, they don’t get erased, or forgotten, but... but those names should be a reminder to do better. The names shouldn’t be edges we cut ourselves on every minute of every day.”

She thinks he is being kind, choosing his words carefully, because what he does not come out and say rings clearly in the space around them.

_Maybe if you stop cutting yourself on the edges of your past, you’ll stop cutting other people, too. Maybe if you trust yourself more, you’ll be better at trusting others. Maybe if you can forgive yourself, even a little, you’ll have an easier time forgiving others._

Maybe if she could rebuild herself, she could build a better life.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you!


End file.
